The Broken Heart – Part 1

The Broken Heart – Part 1
Matters of the Heart Series

All of us have experienced failure and hurt of some sort in our lives, some kind of heartache.

We have had to face our own inadequacies, inabilities–yes, our own sinfulness. Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.” If we are shocked at another person’s sin, we’ve never really seen our own sinfulness.

 We make poor decisions.
We experience a breakdown in communication with the people we love, and the misunderstanding breaks our heart.
We fail in the goals we had set forth for our lives.
We lose someone we love through death or divorce.
We are in a broken marriage. It may be “together” on the outside, but on the inside it’s broken emotionally.  Maybe your spouse has had, or is having an affair, and you are hiding it. Maybe you had an affair, or wanted to. Maybe you had an emotional affair, but it was devastating to your marriage nevertheless.
We deny what we believe by the way we act. That’s hypocrisy — the number one allegation against the church. Peter Lord says, “We practice daily what we really believe. All else is religious chatter.” We don’t live what we profess. We live what we actually believe. And when we see the hypocrisy in our own lives, it breaks our hearts.
We do the one thing we said we would never do. Often our failures occur in the area of our greatest strength.
We have traumatic memories with which we have to deal.  Abuse – physical, verbal, emotional, sexual.  Rape.  Molestation.  Incest.
We have so much pride it paralyzes us.
We have given in to what we knew was wrong or sinful, or we have given in to less than the best for ourselves.
We realize we are not spiritually superior. We struggle with sin and human failure just like everyone else.
We have suffered from the slings and arrows of slander or criticism.
We have had a rebellious child, and that child was raised “right.”
Our parents were less than they should have been. Maybe you don’t even know who your natural parents are. You may feel you were an “accident.”
We’ve failed in our calling to be Jesus in our world.
We struggle with rejection, low self-esteem, depression.

We have all experienced the anguish and/or hurt of a broken heart and failure at one time or another. The great servants of God – Abraham, Moses, David, Paul – they all dealt with failure of one kind or another. Abraham gave his wife to Pharoah; Moses was a murderer; David was an adulterer and a murderer; Paul was a murderer; Peter denied Jesus.

All of us are going to suffer a broken heart and/or failure. What we need to learn is how to allow God to use our failures, our inadequacies, our inabilities for His glory. (Tweet this!) How to turn what Satan meant for evil around to His good in our lives.

In his book, “Inside Out” Larry Crabb says, “We all fall – if we never fail we would never experience the absolute reliability of His grace.” There are aspects of the Lord’s nature we will never experience until we are forced to face our own inadequacies, sinfulness, inabilities, helplessness, etc. We will never fully experience His love and compassion, or His forgiveness if we never fail or hurt.

What are you dealing with today?  We are all dealing with something, past or present.  Or we will. You can count on it. The question to ask is not “Why me?”  but “Why not me?”

Write down the times your heart has been broken and present it to the Lord. Give that broken heart to Him to heal it and give you the courage to move forward. The point at which you have been broken and then healed is the point at which God will use you. (Tweet this!) Next week we will look at how Jesus deals with failure and a broken heart.

I would love to hear stories of how the Lord has healed you of a broken heart and used your trials for good. Please share below.

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